1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a print control apparatus and a method of controlling a process of printing an image on a recording sheet in accordance with print data input via an interface, and a storage medium storing print control programs, and more particularly to a serial printer for printing information while a head as a print unit is reciprocally scanned and a recording sheet is transported in a direction perpendicular to the scan direction of the head.
2. Related Background Art
Printers of this type, particularly serial printers, are each equipped with a plurality of interfaces and perform a print process by automatically exchanging interfaces in accordance with reception conditions of print data, reciprocally scanning a head and transporting a recording sheet in a direction perpendicular to the scan direction of the head. A print process is also performed by receiving a printer control command and print data from a host computer, and a printed recording sheet is ejected upon reception of a paper ejection command to thereby complete a series of print sequences.
Depending upon an application program or specific emulation program (page descriptive language analysis program) of a host computer, a paper ejection command among printer control commands is not supplied from the host computer and the printed sheet is left in the printer even after the print process is completed. A printed sheet may also be left in the printer when the print process is suspended because of some trouble of the host computer.
In a process of printing information supplied from a non-PC apparatus such as a digital camera, an Internet television and a television game machine, since the non-PC apparatus has no means for editing image data and the format of each print data is different, each print data is printed independently on a different recording sheet.
FIGS. 9A to 9C are schematic diagrams illustrating a continuous print state when there is a remaining sheet in a conventional print control apparatus.
FIG. 9A illustrates print data, e.g., text data of a page unit first received, FIG. 9B illustrates print data, e.g., graphics data, and FIG. 9C illustrates a print output obtained by receiving print data from an unrepresented first interface, printing it out, stopping printing without receiving a paper ejection command, immediately thereafter receiving print data from an unrepresented second interface and resuming printing.
With a printer having such a paper ejection control, for example, after the print data shown in FIG. 9A is printed out and the printed sheet remains in the printer, if the next print data shown in FIG. 9B is received from another interface, both the print data shown in FIGS. 9A and 9B and received from different interfaces are printed out on the same sheet.
Further, if any trouble occurs while print data supplied from a host computer via a first interface is printed and if data is received from another host computer via a second interface while the printed sheet remains in the printer, both the print data are printed out on the same sheet.
Still further, as described above, according to the related art, in order to print a plurality of files such as shown in FIGS. 10A to 10C on a single sheet such as shown in FIG. 10D, it is necessary to print the files after editing them by application software.
Furthermore, in order to print a mixed document such as shown in FIG. 11D having image data such as a photograph and text data, application software for desk-top publishing is usually required.
If image data is to be written in a document by using application software such as "Photoshop", the text data is also required to have the information amount generally same as the image data so that the size of each file becomes large.
After a photograph such as shown in FIG. 11A is directly printed from a digital camera, the printed sheet is again placed on a paper feed cassette and print data such as shown in FIG. 11B is printed in a superposed manner to obtain the print result shown in FIG. 11D. In this case, the print start position of the print data shown in FIG. 11B is required to be shifted.